Spandau Phoenix (105 page)

"Hold your positions!" Major Karami shouted.

The 105mm howitzer stood only twenty meters from the Arinscor.

Two of Captain Barnard's bullets struck the barrel of the big gun, sending several Libyans scurrying for cover, but Major Karami stood still as stone.

"Hold your positions!" he roared. "Set elevation and blow that pile of shit out of my way!"

For an artillery piece the shot was point blank. Everyone opened their mouths and put both hands over their ears. Major Karami raised one brown hand high, then dropped it.

"Fire!

Pieter Smuts's bullet struck Gadi square in the center of the chest. The Israeli flew backward and knocked Stern down. Gadi had fired a burst, but only one round struck the Afrikaner, splintering his left wrist in a spray of blood and bone. Before either man could move again, the exploding howitzer shell shook-the ceiling of the basement like a thunderclap.

"They're coming!" Hans shouted.

Hauer saw the subsequent action in slow motion. Smuts steadied his pistol for a second shot. Gadi-who had been saved by his body armor-struggled to his feet. Hauer shouted a warning to Smuts, but the Afrikaner fired anyway.

His second shot tore through Gadi's unprotected right thigh.

As Hauer heard the second howitzer shell explode above them, he raised General Steyn's pistol, pointed it at Smuts and fired four times.

His bullets nailed the Afrikaner to the wall. Smuts hung there a moment, wide-eyed, then dropped like a sack across his master's crippled legs.

"Pieter!" Hess cried. "My God, no!"

Another explosion shuddered through the house.

"It's now or bloody never!" Burton shouted. He too last look at Hess on the floor, then he turned and ran.

"Everyone out!" Stern ordered. "Now! Go!"

Hauer hustled General Steyn toward the dark laboratory aisles that led to the tunnels, but the wounded general collapsed after ten steps.

HAuer started dragging him; Hans came back to help. Dr. Sabri glanced fearfully at Gadi, then darted after the others.

"May I come with you, sir?" he asked Hauer.

Hauer shoved the Libyan down the aisle, then turned back to Stern.

"Give us every goddamn second you can, Stern!

These people deserve to live! Keep your fanatic nephew with you and hold them off as long as you can!"

"Don't worry, you Kraut bastard!" Gadi yelled back, gripping his bleeding thigh. "I'm staying! I'll kill every Arab up there!"

"No, Gadif" Stern insisted. "You're going with them! You must get Hess out!"

"I'm staying with your" Gadi pointed his assault rifle at the old Nazi.

"Go to hell, you Nazi bastard!"

Stern grabbed his arm. "Stop! You must take Hess to Israel! Pick him up, Gadi! Pick him up and carry him out of here! Carry him all the way to Jerusalem! He'll hang soon enough!"

Hauer and the others had paused halfway to the tunnel.

All eyes were riveted on the surreal drama taking place in the pool of fluorescent light before the silver storage vault.

Even facing their own deaths, those who wanted so desperately to live could not tear their eyes away from two men so ready to die without fear or regret. Another explosion rattled the glassware in the lab.

"The Englishman's gone!" Hans shouted. "Let's go!"

Dr. Sabri broke and ran. Hans shoved Ilse after the Libyan.

Stern squatted astride the bomb and picked up the stripped detonator wires.

"Mother of God," Hauer murmured, blcking toward the shadows.

Gadi stubbornly took up a firing position behind Stern.

Stern turned around and gazed into the young commando's burning eyes.

His voice cracked with emotion. "In the name of Abraham, Gadi, take Hess to Israel. That is not an order.

It is a sacred charge on the souls of your ancestors. Leave me a gun and get Hess out!"

A tear streaked the young Israeli's face. With shaking hands he laid his rifle against the bomb casing and crossed to where Hess lay.

Favoring his good leg, he crouched down, caught the old man under the arms, and lifted. Hess immediately began to struggle. Gadi punched him in the side of the head. Then he heaved the wasted body over his shoulder.

"Yes!" Stern called. "Get him out!"

Quivering beneath his hundred-pound load, the wounded Israeli staggered after Hauer and Hans. Yet after only four short steps his savaged thigh muscle gave way. He crashed to the floor, screaming in agony. Hess fell on top of him.

Gadi clenched his jaws shut and rolled the old man off.

Then, with his bloody thigh twitching uncontrollably, he struggled to his feet again. Again he hoisted Hess to his shoulder and tried to walk. He gasped with each step, fighting the searing fire in his leg.

Like a boxer knocked senseless but still on his feet, he reeled backward toward Stern.

"No, Gadi!" Stern barked. "The other way! Forward!"

The young commando tottered a moment, then collapsed.

Hess hit the floor hard this time and didn't move. Sobbing with rage and pain, Gadi got to his knees and tried once more to lift the old man.

He summoned every ounce of strength he had left, but Smuts's bullet had done too much damage.

46I can't do it, Uncle! I'll never get him through the tunnel!"

"Hauer!" Stern shouted. "Come back and help the boy!"

"Yes!" Gadi called. "Help me, Captain!"

Hauer's answer flared out of the darkness. "Hess can go to hell!

I'm saving General Steyn! You just hold those Arabs back as long as you can!"

"You owe it to us!" Stern shouted. "For Munich! Yes, I know you were there! Come back, Hauer! For the Jews you let die!"

"Let it go, Stern! That war is over!"

"Leave him, (Yadi," Stern cried angrily. "Frau Apfel has the Zinoviev book and the Spandau papers. That's all the proof you need.

Those papers alone indict the British."

"Then I'm staying with you!"

"No. You must get that evidence to Israel!"

"The others can do it."

"A Jew, Gadi. A Jew must do it. To be sure."

Gadi looked wildly at his uncle for a moment, then made his decision. He stripped the guns from the South Africans he had killed and laid them at Stern's feet. "Kill as many as you can, Uncle. I will get your papers to Jerusalem."

Stern smiled. "I know you Will, MY boy. Now go." He hugged Gadi's face to his own. "Shalom."

"Shalom, Uncle." Gadi choked back a sob. "No Jew will ever forget you."

"Go," Stern commanded. "My time has come."

Dragging his bleeding leg behind him, Gadi picked up his rifle and went.

The barrel of Major Karami's howitzer now protruded through the shattered front door of Horn House. Karami watched the leader of his search detail race into the reception hall.

"We find only corpses and servants in the house, Major!"

Karami smiled. "Clear the house."

Taking a last look at the black shield blocking the elevator, the Libyan major squeezed between the door frame and the gun carriage and took up a position behind the howitzer.

He remembered the elevator from his first visit, and he knew that at the bottom of its deep shaft lay Horn's basement storage facility.

And inside that basement-a sword worthy of Mohammed himself!

"Fire!" he shouted.

Alan Burton had been waiting in the darkness beside the bunker for a full minute when Dr. Sabri poked his head through the jagged hatch.

"Come on, then!" he snapped as he pulled the Libyan out.

"I heard you speaking Arabic back there, sport. You with these blighters out here?"

"No, sir! Those men are assassins! They murdered my prime minister!"

Before Burton could reply, Ilse squirmed out of the black hole.

She explained that Hauer and Hans were still struggling through the tunnel with General Steyn. Burton looked anxiously at his watch.

"We can't wait any longer," he said.

"You'd better follow me.@ He turned and trotted toward the airstrip. Dr.

Sabri followed , but Ilse hung back, clinging tightly to Hess's briefcase.

After thirty agonizing seconds, General Steyn's head appeared, his face a bloodless mask of shock and confusion.

While Hauer and Hans pushed from behind, Ilse pulled.

Hans followed the general through the hatch, and finally Hauer wriggled through. Ilse hugged Hans fiercely, sandwiching Hess's briefcase between them. Only Gadi had not yet appeared.

"Come on," Hauer said harshly. "Either he makes it or he doesn't."

Jonas Stern squatted silently on his cylinder of Armageddon and waited for the Libyans to come. Holding the stripped wires like talismans, he surveyed the shadows around him. He was king in a world of corpses. At his feet lay the South African counterterror troops, their futuristic.

gas masks lethally punctured by Gadi's bullets. Behind them, splayed out on his back like a broken doll, Pieter Smuts lay in a spreading pool of blood. Only Rudolf Hess remained alive. Too crippled by arthrifis to drag his frail body to safety, the old Nazi had managed to struggle into a sitting position against the wall to Stern's left. His eyepatch had slipped off. Now a scarred, empty socket stared at Stern.

Stern listened for the slightest sound from the far end of the lab.

He heard nothing. He looked curiously at Hess.

Here was the man who had brought them all to this place.

Hess ... The name carried Stern back to a youth so torn by fear, loss, and pain that he remembered only the ceaseless throb of grief.

He had survived the cruelest war that ever scourged the earth, and near him now lay one of the men who had unleashed it upon the world.

Strangely, he felt no personal hatred for the bag of brittle bones-only a detached curiosity, a desire to know if there had ever been some reason for what was done.

"Hess," he said softly.

The old Nazi's good eye fluttered open. "What do you want, Jew?"

"Tell me something. Have you ever come to understand what Hitler did?

The obscenity of it? The inhumanity?"

Hess looked away.

"Tell me," Stern insisted. "I want to know why. Why the Holocaust? Why murder thousands of children? What was it

the Jews ever do to him? Or to you?"

Hess looked back at Stern. Another explosion rocked the ceiling above them, but Stern saw only Hess. A dark fire had come into the withered Nazi's solitary eye, a blind, animal hatred so removed from the community of man that Stern felt driven to cross the room and crush the skull that conrained it. It was a blindness that could not see murder, a deafness that could not hear the screams of children, a muteness that could speak only through violence. Why did I even ask?

he thought hopelessly. It's like asking a bully why he drowns a cat ...

or a father why he molests his infant child or some reason one could understand. There

... and hoping f

is no reason! Stern lifted an R-5 assault rifle from the floor and brought its barrel to bear on Hess's crippled body. The old Nazi's watery eye showed no fear.

"You want to kill me, Jew?" he said softly. "You can kill me.

But you cannot kill what I lived for. Captain Hauer said Phoenix will be wiped out. But he is wrong. What united the men of Phoenix exists everywhere. In Germany. South America. In the Soviet Union.

The United States and Britain. Everywhere. All governments know about our groups, but they do nothing. The press calls them ultra-right organizations. A few members go to jail now and then, so what?

Why are they tolerated? Because deep down, people understand these movements. They express something every civilized man feels-the '

justified fear of anarchy, of racial destruction. They know that one day the great struggle will come ... the struggle against the Schwarze and Asian and the Jew-"

"Didn't you hear what I said this afternoon!"

Stern cried.

"The Jews don't want to destroy anyone! That's the difference between us and you. We have the power to vaporize our enemies, yet we choose not to."

Hess smirked. "I'll tell you what that tells me, Jew. It tells me that your race is weak. The Jew is clever enough to build atomic weapons, but he lacks the moral courage to use what he has created."

"You're mad," Stern said quietly.

Hess chuckled. "Don't deceive yourself. There are individuals in Israel who want to use their nuclear weapons.

That is why your nation must be obliterated."

With a profound emptiness, Stern dropped his rifle to the floor and turned away. Seeing this, Hess heaved himself away from the wall and began dragging himself slowly toward Stern.

"You'll have to kill me, Jew."

Sweating and grunting in the darkness of the airstrip, Hans and Hauer lifted General Steyn through the main door of the Libyan Learjet.